There are some hard and fast rules that I feel have to be followed by game developers making titles for portable systems, and foremost among those rules is that the experience should be tailored to allow for the smallest of bite-sized gaming on the go. It doesn’t matter how good a portable game is if it cannot be broken down into small chunks that allow you to progress in extremely short gaming sessions.. Unfortunately, Secret Agent Clank by High Impact Games flagrantly breaks this cardinal rule making it extremely difficult to recommend for the PSP.{ad}

The reason I start the review of this game with this disclaimer is the extremely frustrating aspect of not allowing mid-level checkpoints to be saved. Items and such get saved when you have to interrupt the game mid-level to do something else, but mid-level checkpoints do not.

It’s an incredibly confusing situation for me. Checkpoints are abundant within the levels (which are not massive or expansive, but are big enough to necessitate this feature), which would make it a simple task for the developer to allow those checkpoints to be saved and restarted at that point later. With the way the game is shipped, however, I can’t imagine anyone playing this on the go. It’s still a decent title for long road trips or for playing in your home when you have time to really focus on it, assuming you can forgive the other flaws in this game.

Speaking of flaws, let’s talk about the camera. Specifically how poorly designed it is for what this game is trying to do. The stealth aspect of Clank’s levels depend wholly on watching the movement of spotlights and guards to determine which path is going to get them through the room unseen. Not the hardest of tasks, until the camera makes it so. Often in the game I would try to survey the room from a safe spot, but the camera simply wouldn’t allow it. It literally forces you to see only Clank huddled in a corner in these cases, and will not allow the camera to pan the room. This culminates in often simply charging into the room, dying, and repeating the process via trial and error until progress is made.

Ratchet levels fare a little better in gameplay terms, and there are aspects of this game that are enjoyable. I particularly enjoyed the rhythm-based mini-games that would occasionally get incorporated into the Clank sneaking levels. Still, the majority of Clank’s levels left such a bad taste in my mouth that it was very hard to return to the chore that this game devolved into. A good camera is arguably the holy grail of gameplay as it is one of the hardest aspects of development to master, and a bad camera can be forgiven if the game is compelling enough to overlook it. This game just never gave me a good enough reason to get over it.

It’s not that the game is terrible – the graphics are bright and colorful as one would expect in a title from this well-known series. The series’ trademark humor is also there, and there is a ton of personality to the characters and the game. If anything, the shortcoming of this game is that there was nothing unique or compelling enough to entice me to struggle through the hideous camera and touchy controls the game presented me. Simply put, there are far better offerings on the PSP to spend your portable gaming time and dollars on.